Drifter's Folly (Peacekeepers of Sol Book 4)

by Glynn Stewart

  “And the drones?” Henry asked.

  “No activity to suggest that they have been detected. Once they’re five light-seconds clear—in about ten minutes—we’ll get a tightbeam download,” she reported.

  “We did it, ser.”

  “It can still get messy, Commander,” Henry warned her. “But we appear to be clear. Once we have those downloads, I’ll want your team and the Tactical team to start putting together a detailed analysis of the Convoy.

  “We’ll stick to them like a burr until Twelfth Fleet gets here, so there’s no rush on that analysis. We’ll want to make sure Admiral Rex has the clearest possible idea of what he’s coming into.”

  “It…doesn’t look like there’s anything here, ser,” Eowyn admitted. “I’m assuming their Guardians are somewhere else, but I can’t think of where they’d have sent them.”

  “We’ll watch for them,” Henry assured her. “And if they come back, we’ll let Admiral Rex know. Our job now is to keep a very careful eye on things—hopefully without being seen.”

  He could feel the tension relax on his bridge as they blazed past the ten-light-second mark. Once they were several light-minutes clear, they’d start the painstaking process of shedding their mind-boggling velocity.

  “Huh, that’s weird.”

  Chan probably hadn’t even meant anyone else to hear their soft-spoken words. With the rest of the flag deck torn between beginning the analysis of the Drifter Convoy and watching the Convoy itself recede in the distance, however, the three words hung in the silence like falling rocks.

  “Commander?” Henry asked.

  “A communication relay drone on the outside of the Convoy just activated,” Chan said quietly, concern clear in their voice. “For…one hundred twenty-six milliseconds. It looks like they sent a controlled-aperture transmission. Not quite a tightbeam but still limiting who received it.”

  “Any idea who got it?” Henry asked.

  “Us,” the coms officer admitted. “Unless I’m misreading this, the transmission zone lined up roughly with our thermal anomaly. I’m still resolving it, but it looks like an encrypted data pulse. It’s not an encryption I recognize…but I can say one thing for sure.”

  “Other than that someone did see us?” Henry asked grimly.

  “It’s one of our encryptions, ser,” Chan told him. “But they wouldn’t have known to use it if they hadn’t guessed we were out here.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  “It’s my code,” Sylvia said quietly after Chan briefed her.

  Henry looked at her in surprise.

  “Would you like to narrow that down a bit?” he asked dryly. He could think of about seven different reasons for the UPA ambassador to have given someone a secure encryption code while she’d been visiting the Convoy. Diplomatic ciphers, prearranged shared encryption protocols…recruited spies…

  “That is my personal network encryption code that I was using to communicate with Shaka while I was aboard the Convoy,” his partner said grimly. “I did not give that to the Drifters. Thankfully, I wasn’t using it for anything confidential at the time—it’s clearly not as secure as I thought.”

  “They’ve had weeks to reverse-engineer it,” Chan said grimly, looking back at where Sylvia stood next to Henry’s chair on the flag deck. “Months, really. But from just the snippets of standard back-and-forth support coms…that’s impressive.”

  “It’s only a level-three encryption,” Sylvia noted. “Standard day-to-day codes, rotated every week or so. I spent enough time aboard their ships that they’d have…a reasonable sample, but still.”

  “Someone is showing off and I don’t like it,” Henry replied.

  “Or someone wants to make very sure that only I can read what they’ve sent,” the ambassador said. “Unfortunately for them, I don’t much care about what the Drifters want. I’m passing you the record of the code my network still has, Commander.”

  Even with that, it took a minute. The internal network implants would keep a record of key markers of all of its historical encryption codes—they had a lot of storage—but they wouldn’t keep the full encryption protocol.

  With access to the base protocol, Paladin could regenerate the full protocol from those key markers and decrypt the data pulse. But even for the quantum computers aboard a UPSF destroyer, generating an entire specific encryption protocol was a time-consuming process.

  “Got it,” Chan finally reported. “Looks like a video and some attached data packets. Everything is in a stand-alone process right now,” they noted. “I should be able to sanitize and play the video easily enough.”

  “Maybe we should watch this in your office, Commodore,” Sylvia suggested. “Someone went to a great deal of effort to get this to us—and did so, from what you’ve said, without betraying our presence.

  “I’m curious what it’s about.”

  “All right,” he agreed. “Eowyn, let me know if we have any situation changes.”

  There was a practiced ritual to Henry and Sylvia having work meetings in his office by now. The mental instruction for his coffeemaker to start as they headed there was almost unconscious—though there wasn’t enough time for the machine to finish making the two cups in the time it took them to reach the office from the flag deck it was attached to.

  Henry leaned against the wall by the machine, studying Sylvia as she, in turn, studied the ship models along the wall. The shelf held models of everything from the SF-114 Tomcat starfighter he’d flown when he first graduated through the two battlecruisers he’d commanded.

  “Are you going to add DesRon Twenty-Seven to the shelf?” she asked absently, gently touching the thirty-centimeter-long model of Raven that was the most recent ship.

  “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I’m not sure how, I suppose.”

  “You could do three smaller models,” she suggested. “Destroyers the size of the starfighters from the other side.”

  “Maybe,” he said, pulling the two coffee cups from the cupboard. “Something to think about when we’re next back in UPA space.” He chuckled softly. “Deeper in than Zion. Not many model-makers in Zion.”

  Zion held Base Fallout, once the logistics support base for the entire war against the Kenmiri and now the home base for the Peacekeeper Initiative. The system’s civilian population had been mass-relocated by the Kenmiri at the start of the war, and the survivors had headed deeper into UPA space after their rescue.

  Base Fallout was the only thing in Zion now.

  “Let’s see this message,” Sylvia said with a sigh as she took the coffee. “I don’t know what this is or even who is sending it, Henry. It’s concerning.”

  “I’m concerned that someone was able to send it when the rest of the Convoy didn’t even act like they’d seen us,” Henry admitted. He took his seat and gave a mental command. The video appeared as a hologram above his desk as Sylvia moved a chair around to sit beside him.

  The image of a single Drifter hung in the air, frozen as he waited for Sylvia to be ready. Like every other Drifter he’d ever seen, the individual was wrapped in heavy robes that obscured their features.

  They wore a Face Mask, a unique mask that identified them as an individual, of a plain silver background with blue spiraling lines.

  “I know that mask, though I won’t guarantee that it’s the same Drifter under it,” Sylvia told him. “They’re a member of the Council of Ancients, the leaders of the Convoy.”

  “Right, gerontocracy,” Henry said. It wasn’t entirely accurate that the Council of Ancients was made up of the oldest members of the Convoy—but that had been the case once and still likely applied to a significant chunk of them.

  “Not quite,” she corrected, echoing his thoughts. “But you knew that. This one did a lot of the talking while I was there. I wonder what they want to say now.”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Henry started the message playback and leaned back in his seat.

  “As I am recording this
message,” the Drifter said in slow Kem, “several friends of mine have located a strange anomaly in this system that they believe represents a potential use of the Terrans’ new gravity drive for stealth.

  “We have no certainty that this message will be received, but our desperation at this point is without limits. While I believe the anomaly would pass without notice by most, I have arranged for it to be buried in our shared network.

  “If this message is being viewed by its intended recipients, my risk has paid off.” There was a vague impression of a shrug under the robes. “If not, I am only talking to myself.

  “I am Blue-Spirals-On-Silver,” they introduced themselves—and from Sylvia’s mostly concealed surprise, Henry realized they had never introduced themselves to her. “I am the Fourth Speaker of the Council of Ancients of the Blue Stripe Green Stripe Orange Stripe Convoy.

  “And I am praying to gods I have not worshipped since I was a child that this message has reached a UPSF commander in the Blue First Dawn System.”

  Blue-Spirals-On-Silver was silent for several seconds.

  “From what Blue-Stripe-Third-Green tells me, Sylvia Todorovich is aboard the ships pursuing us, so this stolen encryption should serve. It serves me by concealing our effort from our shared enemy.

  “But I should start at the beginning,” they said finally. “You will want to know why we betrayed you, and it is all of one piece.”

  The masked face looked down for a few moments, then focused on the camera.

  “When the Kenmiri retreated, my Convoy was in the Osiris Province,” they told Henry and Sylvia. “In the territory the Kenmiri Remnant still claim.”

  The twenty Kenmiri provinces had been named for their ancient gods. When humanity had managed to acquire translations, they discovered that the section of space they’d named for the Egyptian sun god Ra because of an old TV show was named for an old Kenmiri sun god.

  The naming schema had stuck after that, with the UPA picking corresponding Egyptian gods for each of the Kenmiri province names.

  Osiris was one of the eight sectors the Kenmiri hadn’t abandoned, the core of four thousand suns they had retreated to to concentrate their numbers. It was the next sector “inward” from Ra.

  “We believed, for a time, that things would go on as always for us,” Blue-Spirals-On-Silver said. “And then the subspace coms failed. We now know the Kenmiri made this happen, but who were we to realize the carrier was artificial? All of our technology was theirs once.

  “But it was revealed that there was more than one plan based around the shutdown of the subspace network,” the Drifter said grimly. “Within days of our loss of communications with the other Convoys, we were ambushed.

  “The Convoys always survived by being more trouble to destroy than we were worth,” Blue-Spirals-On-Silver noted. “After the Retreat, the metrics had changed. We were surrounded by dreadnoughts and informed that we had a simple choice: my Convoy would act as spies for the Kenmiri in the Abandoned Sectors…or we would be destroyed.

  “All that we do—all that we have ever done—is to preserve our Convoy.”

  Those words hung in the air in Henry’s office as he looked at Sylvia. This was far beyond his worst fears. The entire Drifter Convoy was a Kenmiri asset?

  “We agreed.” The Drifter’s tone was heavy, even their mask and a second language failing to conceal their weariness and grief. “We were forced to give up many of our weapons. Our escorts were replaced with Kenmiri-crewed ships. Bombs and agents were planted in key vessels throughout the Convoy.

  “We had no choice but to continue to comply, even once we had left their space. And they had some kind of communication with the Remnant still,” Blue-Spirals-On-Silver explained. “We delivered listening posts, Warrior contingents, stealth ships… We have traversed much of this sector now and left a trail of Kenmiri infiltrators behind us.

  “But that was not enough…and when Sylvia Todorovich approached us, they altered the deal.”

  Henry had suspected as much. Now he needed to know how badly things had gone. If the Drifters were a Kenmiri asset, Twelfth Fleet’s deployment was more critical than he’d ever feared.

  “We betrayed your peace summit and attempted to keep you at war. There were enough of us that could argue a value to us that we convinced ourselves it was for the best…until the plan failed, and thousands of our siblings had died for a Kenmiri plot.

  “And then, as we planned to run as far and as fast as we could, far beyond the reach of the United Planets Alliance, the Kenmiri altered the deal again. We were to delay, to travel slowly, to allow ourselves to be bait. Our warships were to strike at targets they gave us, aggravating wars across the sector and clearing the way for a trap that would consume an entire UPSF fleet.

  “We refused.”

  Henry blinked in surprise and glanced over at Sylvia. She looked equally thrown, but her focus remained on the video.

  “Our Kenmiri commander destroyed four of our Guardians with the press of a button,” Blue-Spirals-On-Silver told them. “He threatened to destroy garden ships next. We had no choice…and the traps were laid. Our Guardians dispersed across the stars around us, to eliminate scouts and weaken your fleet before it reached us.”

  That…made a disturbing amount of sense, Henry realized. The question, though, was Where is the trap? There were no warships there that could threaten Twelfth Fleet. Even if there were still five more Guardians in the star systems around Blue First Dawn, that wasn’t enough to stop three full carrier groups.

  “The escorts that are guarding our Convoy today are all Kenmiri,” the Drifter told them. “They are more advanced than you think, with drives and shields that are more powerful than you have seen before.

  “But they lack the resonance weapons. Those were a Drifter weapon and one we concealed from the Kenmiri to protect the other Convoys. The Kenmiri have never seen them deployed and do not know they exist. That will give you a thin edge for what must be done.”

  “And now the kicker,” Sylvia murmured. “They’ve told us the sob story. Now the request.”

  “The Kenmiri did not trust us with their new communicator,” Blue-Spirals-On-Silver said. “It is apparently larger and cannot be mounted on their escorts or their new raiders. Only their dreadnoughts are large enough to carry the new subspace communicator.”

  “Oh, fuck them all,” Henry whispered. The dreadnoughts in the hands of the Vesheron factions were universally smaller and older ships. A fully updated, modern Kenmiri dreadnought…

  “They believe they have a countermeasure to your starfighters at last,” the Drifter warned. “I do not know what it is; they did not share it with my people. But they believed that two of their new dreadnoughts, combined with our Guardians and the escorts they’d concealed amongst my people, would suffice to overcome the fleet you sent after us.

  “They could not easily join us in Eerdish space; it would have been too obvious. But they made their precautions. One of the Guardians you see in the Convoy is an older dreadnought, refitted with their subspace coms and with several of our modules attached to disguise it.

  “The other two and their escorts were never more than a skip away—and now, they orbit Blue First Dawn’s counterpart. From there, they will ambush any attack on the Convoy and destroy it.”

  “Can they?” Sylvia whispered, the message automatically pausing.

  “It depends on how upgraded those new dreadnoughts are and what their anti-fighter system is,” Henry admitted. “Rex’s people would be careful when launching strikes into the Convoy, focusing on precision over firepower.

  “If we missed two dreadnoughts…there would be a vulnerability. Maybe enough of one.” Henry cursed under his breath as he looked at the frozen image of the Drifter leader.

  “Let’s see what else the Drifters have to say,” he told her. “I think this information might be enough… Maybe.”

  He unpaused the message.

  “I want this nightmare to end,” Blue-Spirals
-On-Silver said calmly. “I have been working with agents throughout the Convoy, and we have a plan. The Kenmiri have underestimated us, as everyone always has.

  “I…believe we can free ourselves. We have a plan for the dreadnought and escorts that are among us, and we have plans for the bombs and garrisons they have emplaced.

  “It will not be without bloodshed, but we can defeat the Kenmiri among us,” the Drifter said firmly. “But we cannot defeat two modern dreadnoughts and their escorts. I have attached their most recent coordinates and every scrap of data we have assembled on their ships.

  “If you can destroy those dreadnoughts, we are prepared to make appropriate reparations for our crimes against your people…but you must act quickly. I suspect—I fear—that they have plans for your fleet that you may not be able to overcome.

  “I pray to the gods of my childhood that this message has been received. I…pray to them for your success—and for the salvation of my people.

  “Step by step, with each seeming necessary and logical, I have broken my oaths and betrayed my Convoy. With this message, I hope to begin to set things right.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Once again, a holographic image hung in the middle of a virtual conference of Henry’s officers. The ship’s lines were familiar to every one of them, Henry knew. There were very few people in the Peacekeeper Initiative who hadn’t served in the War—most of the post-War recruits didn’t feel quite the same need to make things right—and the Kenmiri dreadnoughts had been the backbone of the alien fleet.

  The scale of this particular dreadnought was something else again.

  “Fourteen hundred meters from end to end,” Eowyn listed. “Based off usual ratios and methodologies, her armor will be approximately twenty meters of raw asteroid rock, backed by another five meters of advanced alloys and ceramics.

  “Mass, according to the Drifters’ data, is approximately sixteen million tons. They’ve confirmed her base armament of fifteen superheavy plasma-cannon turrets.”